Originally Posted by
Hawes7701
The other day a colleague of mine was logging in to his virgin flying club account whilst on the phone to them trying to book an economy flight. I was tempted to tell him to hang up and find a better use for his miles
Side note here. I do not know if using Virgin miles for Economy is (subjectively) a bad idea, but one of the most frequent mistakes people make who fall into hoarding miles habit (which is variation of gambling addiction) is not to use them.
Because with the exception of Venezuela's Bolivar and similar cases, points/miles have the highest inflation rates in general and miles earned need to be spent fairly quickly - they
are not your retirement savings.
And here comes 'failure to notice' phenomenon - not noticing that miles/points lose value (in this particular case).
People do not notice certain stuff they
should be noticing. This phenomenon was the winner of one of the best episodes of 'Tell Me Something I Don't Know' podcast. Highly recommended to listen.
Ready for a thought experiment? You have to pick between four investment funds: Option A outperformed the market by about 30 percent over the last 9 years. Option B outperformed the market by 45 percent with moderately erratic performance. Option C has outperformed the market by 65 percent with absolutely no volatility in performance. Option D outperformed the market by 70 percent with a lot of erratic differences across years. Which fund do you choose?
It’s a well-known fact of investing that it is impossible to dramatically outperform the market over 9 years with absolutely no volatility. And yet, most people are perfectly comfortable investing in exactly that (Option C, which effectively describes
Bernie Madoff‘s ponzi scheme). Most people also admit that Option C is impossible. So what’s happening? Harvard Business School professor Max Bazerman describes it in this episode of
Tell Me Something I Don’t Know as a “failure to notice.”
Originally Posted by
RustyC
Mileage earning by flying is effectively gutted except for biz travelers
This is classical 'failure to notice case' mentioned above.
The main question people booking flights (or purchasing something else for purpose to earn miles) should be - 'how much would I pay (maximum) for this route/ticket (or item) if there was no mileage earnings'?
Originally Posted by
RustyC
So I've gone from too-complicated-to-explain to "You missed out" as far as explanations go. Neither are very satisfying, I know. I still do quite a bit of travel, but mostly with ULCCs domestically and deals like what you see on The Flight Deal internationally, and without much of a mileage game attached.
Same here, plus using miles when necessary. Just booked two tickets with UA miles SIN-SFO in Economy.